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The Sunday Read: ‘Wikipedia’s Moment of Truth’

The Sunday Read: ‘Wikipedia’s Moment of Truth’

The Daily vor 3 Jahren

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51:59

In early 2021, a Wikipedia editor peered into the future and saw
what looked like a funnel cloud on the horizon: the rise of
GPT-3, a precursor to the new chatbots from OpenAI. When this
editor — a prolific Wikipedian who goes by the handle Barkeep49
on the site — gave the new technology a try, he could see that it
was untrustworthy. The bot would readily mix fictional elements
(a false name, a false academic citation) into otherwise factual
and coherent answers. But he had no doubts about its potential.
“I think A.I.’s day of writing a high-quality encyclopedia is
coming sooner rather than later,” he wrote in “Death of
Wikipedia,” an essay that he posted under his handle on Wikipedia
itself. He speculated that a computerized model could, in time,
displace his beloved website and its human editors, just as
Wikipedia had supplanted the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which in
2012 announced it was discontinuing its print publication.

Recently, when I asked this editor if he still worried about his
encyclopedia’s fate, he told me that the newer versions made him
more convinced that ChatGPT was a threat. “It wouldn’t surprise
me if things are fine for the next three years,” he said of
Wikipedia, “and then, all of a sudden, in Year 4 or 5, things
drop off a cliff.”

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